Brian M Downing
President Barack Obama has ordered the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Though how many and how fast remains unknown, it seems that only a relatively small force will remain after 2014 as part of the recently signed strategic partnership between the US and Afghanistan.
Withdrawal will be welcomed by large sections of the American public but it will undoubtedly come at a faster pace than the generals want. It will deepen the mistrust between a liberal administration and the uniformed experts on warfare who expected their views regarding Afghanistan to prevail over those of a youthful politician.
This will cause a stir in the officer corps where the president and his party are professionally respected but looked upon with suspicion, to say the least. The president for his part has signaled his aloofness from the opinion of the military. A mutual mistrust between liberal democrats and the military has been part of American life since the late 1970s. Obama’s withdrawal order could well deepen that mistrust and the issue may be felt at November’s presidential election and beyond.
Military mistrust
Only a few decades ago, the military had an unwritten but forceful norm against partisan politics. Professional soldiers were the armed servants of presidents, regardless of the latter’s political party, and many high-ranking officers even felt it unethical to vote. Today, the generals remain obedient to presidents but respect for the commander-in-chief varies from administration to administration, with Republicans admired and Democrats mistrusted. Some recent Democratic presidents have been despised.
The divide goes back to the Jimmy Carter administration (1977-1981) that lowered the priority of defense spending and, in the eyes of the generals, held an aversion to military action and failed to discern growing threats in the world posed by the Soviet Union.
Carter’s administration ably reflected the public mood after the Vietnam defeat, but when Iranian students seized the US Embassy and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, both in 1979, blame fell on the president and his party.
Ronald Reagan’s electoral victory in 1980 was followed by an expansion of military budgets and an influx of fundamentalist officers.
Military culture became more deeply infused with political conservatism and the religious right than ever before. Ultimately, military culture became alloyed with neo-conservatism. Indeed, neo-conservatism’s view of the military as a bastion of virtue and advocate of global power resonated with the military’s view of itself.
Today the military (and neo-conservatism) sees the Obama administration as a replay of the Bill Clinton and Carter administrations – eager to cut defense spending and step back from geopolitics. In the middle-level officer corps there is visceral dislike for the president that manifests itself in conversations with officials in the State Department, the Agency for International Development and other governmental bureaus – often to the officials’ astonishment and dismay. These military officers see Obama as politically and ethnically alien to American values as they understand them. His change of course in Afghanistan will take place in this troubling context.
Mutual mistrust
Reports of meetings between the president and the generals often cite the former’s apparent unease around the flag officers. Some analyses offer explanations: a callow young politician out of his element among the professional military elite; or a man preoccupied with domestic issues with little interest in foreign affairs and overwhelmed in the presence of those specializing in strategic matters.
Both arguments show little comprehension of the confidence Obama has in himself, which has manifested itself for many years prior to his taking the oath of office. His self-confidence is clear to most who’ve met him, overweening to all who’ve worked with him. His unease around generals is not a sign of being in awe of them. It’s a sign he is unimpressed by them and perhaps has little regard for them.
This unflattering view of the military is not based simply on the president’s personal musings and capacious aplomb. It is based on the strategic assessments of many analysts and statesmen, including some on the conservative side, who see recent military ventures as stupendous blunders that have not advanced the nation’s security.
Former secretary of defense Robert Gates fits this description and this is almost certainly why the longtime Grand Old Party public servant and statesman was retained as secretary of defense when Obama became president in 2009.
While the military does not make policy, only implements it, the generals have enabled costly and unpromising foreign ventures with an institutional preference for internationalism and an overweening confidence of their own that will never sound retreat and never admit a situation cannot be solved by more troops and more resources and more time.
New course
In the autumn of 2009, amid strategic discussions of the deepening Afghan crisis and the future course, the president displayed rare anger at the narrow range of options the generals had presented him – all of which entailed sending more troops. He ultimately authorized a much smaller troop increase than the generals asked for (about half) and set a time limit of 18 months, after which he would withdraw at least some troops, after which he may or may not have expected an improved security situation.
In as much as 18 months is a tight limit for counter-insurgency operations to bear fruit, the president probably did not expect an improved security situation, pleased though he and others would be to see one.
The military saw the lower troop increase in 2009 and tight time limit as temporary compromises. In time, they believed they could disabuse the young politician of his hesitance and persuade him that more time and resources would stabilize Afghanistan. [1] The announcement of sharp troop reductions suggests the generals were wrong in their assessments of both the president’s malleability and their strategy in Afghanistan.
The generals’ counter-insurgency program failed to show appreciable signs of spreading out of a few enclaves, and the president determined that the generals would not lead him into deepening and protracted conflict as they did his predecessor back in the 1960s. He ordered troop reductions and an end to US combat operations.
The administration’s full Afghan strategy cannot be known with certainty as there are too many variables at play. Logistics through Pakistan and Russia are up in the air; the Taliban’s willingness to negotiate is unclear; and domestic pressure in the US could rise from its present-day low levels.
Two scenarios, however, seem to be coming into view. First, a continued war of attrition in the south with the Afghan National Army (ANA) taking over from US and the International Security Assistance Force. The ANA will not be expected to defeat the insurgents or expand the size of their enclaves; they will only be expected to hold fortified positions and continue to wear down the insurgents. In this effort they can rely on US airpower and reaction forces.
Second, should the southern enclaves fall, the US and ANA will retreat to the north, where the populace is hostile to the Taliban and reasonably supportive of the US presence. From there, the war of attrition will continue until meaningful negotiations come. [2]
Military response
The president’s new policy, though contradictory of the generals’ position, will find some welcome support inside the military, despite prevalent mistrust in him. Many officers, including high-ranking ones, see counterinsurgency doctrines as a passing fad sold to credulous, panicked politicians amid the Iraq insurgency by a maverick general and his acolytes. Counter-insurgency, they hold, has no clear record of success anywhere, not even Iraq. More importantly, counter-insurgency and any large presence in Afghanistan detract from concentration on conventional warfare and the more pressing strategic issue of containing China.
Others, however, will not like being rebuffed by the president on a matter they profess to have great expertise in. Discontent may surface in the upcoming presidential election, which is beginning to look like a close-run thing as a softening economy looms.
Active-duty officers will of course not openly express their dismay, but retired colleagues may speak out and profess to speak for those still in uniform. However, unless events in Afghanistan turn hard for the worse between now and November, military discontent will have little sway in a public weary of the war and hopeful it will go away.
Notes
1. This point is made in David E Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (New York: Crown Books, 2012).
2. See my Plan B for Afghanistan, Asia Times, July 29, 2010; Robert D Blackwill, “Plan B in Afghanistan: Why a De Facto Partition Is the Least Bad Option,” Foreign Affairs January/February 2011.
Brian M Downing is a political/military analyst and author of The Military Revolution and Political Change and The Paths of Glory: War and Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam.